Client Profile

A mid-market third-party logistics (3PL) provider managing multi-carrier freight operations across regional distribution centers, with a legacy Warehouse Management System (WMS), a Transportation Management System (TMS), and a patchwork of EDI connections to carriers and customers built up over a decade of point-to-point integrations.

The Challenge

The client’s operations team was spending significant manual effort reconciling shipment status across systems that didn’t talk to each other in real time:

Key challenges included:

• Fragmented visibility – Customer service reps had to log into three separate systems to answer a single “where’s my shipment” question. 
• Brittle EDI integrations – Point-to-point EDI 204 (load tender), 214 (status), and 990 (response) connections were tightly coupled to specific carrier formats, making it costly to onboard new carriers. 
• Manual WMS-to-ERP reconciliation – Inventory and order status updates between the warehouse and finance systems required nightly batch jobs and manual exception handling, delaying invoicing by 24–48 hours. 
• No single API layer – Every new customer portal or carrier integration meant custom point-to-point work, with no reusable components.

The Approach 

Kadel Labs partnered with the client’s IT team to design and implement a MuleSoft Anypoint Platform integration layer, applying API-led connectivity principles to decouple systems and expose reusable services: 

1. System APIs – Built foundational APIs wrapping the WMS, TMS, and ERP systems, abstracting away legacy protocols (including flat-file and EDI formats) behind modern REST interfaces.
2. Process APIs – Orchestrated shipment lifecycle logic — load tender, in-transit status updates, exception handling, and proof-of-delivery — into a unified shipment-status process layer, translating EDI 204/214/990 transactions into normalized events.
3. Experience APIs – Delivered purpose-built APIs for two consumer channels:
   • A customer-facing track-and-trace dashboard with real-time shipment status
   • An internal ops console giving customer service reps a single view of shipment, inventory, and invoicing status
4. Carrier Onboarding Framework – Standardized carrier integration through a reusable API template, cutting new-carrier onboarding time from several weeks of custom development to a configuration-driven process.
5. Automated WMS-to-ERP Sync – Replaced nightly batch reconciliation with near-real-time event-driven sync between the WMS and ERP, using MuleSoft’s API layer to trigger inventory and order-to-cash updates as they occurred rather than in scheduled batches.

Outcome 

• Reduced shipment-status resolution time for customer service from multiple system lookups to a single dashboard view 
• Cut new-carrier onboarding time from weeks to days through the standardized API template 
• Accelerated invoicing cycle by eliminating batch-driven WMS-to-ERP delays 
• Established a reusable API catalog system, process, and experience APIs — reducing the cost and time of future integration work (new customer portals, additional carriers, M&A system consolidation) 

Why This Matters for Logistics Organizations

Freight and 3PL operations tend to accumulate the same integration debt: legacy EDI, disconnected WMS/TMS/ERP systems, and one-off point-to-point connections that become expensive to maintain as the carrier and customer network grows. An API-led integration layer turns each new integration from a custom project into a configuration exercise — the core value proposition Kadel Labs brings as a MuleSoft integration partner to logistics and supply chain organizations.